Our Adoption Story – Episode One

Let’s Begin

My mission behind this blog is to give you an honest and real insight into what adoption entails right now. I will be documenting our entire adoption journey from an LGBT perspective (as Mark and I happen to be two fabulous gays); with the aim of hopefully helping those other crazy folks who are contemplating adoption, fostering or other methods of welcoming a child into their family. I’m hoping that from our adoption story you’ll learn and understand what we went through in order to be placed with a child. Not all stories are the same, but hopefully you’ll enjoy ours and find it interesting. Let’s commence Part 1!

When We Were Young

We found that during our initial research online and in books, that the experiences and advice came across quite neggy (see Glossary), and we both agreed that if we were successful in having a child placed we would document everything.

Where to begin? I guess the best place to start is when we were in talks, which happened pretty early into our relationship. Infact, I think we both knew each other wanted to have children before we actually started dating – this probably made him more attractive, to be honest… All those potential DILF (Again, See Glossary) vibes obviously had me sold into starting a relationship with him ha.

First date vibes.

Mark comes from a large family and is extremely close to his mum, they share so many great qualities; family orientated, kind and caring. I guess this is where he got his want for starting a family from. I on the other hand was raised by a single mum – who, if you know me did an amazing job! As an only child I knew I wanted a family but also, that I wanted more than one child. There was always the worry for me that being gay meant that I probably wouldn’t meet the one and settle down, nor would I have the chance to have children.

So by meeting Mark, this idea was completely scrubbed as we shared the same values and opinions. He was definitely worth deleting Grindr, Hornet, Tinder, POF,Gaydar and Bumder for! …Bumder is a fake app from How To Get Away with Murder, but if it were real I would have had it. Desperate much.

Researching Insta Dilfs

Being Adoption novices we didn’t really know what the adoption process entailed, or if we wanted to go down that avenue. Friends and family often told us we should go for Surrogacy, but something about paying and having someone else carry our child didn’t really resonate with us. This being the reason we did some research into the various methods. We decided that Adoption was the one for us. Having a child that looked like us was completely irrelevant, adopting a child that hasn’t had the best start to life and is in need of a loving family and home seemed a lot more befitting to our nature.

As I said earlier so many articles online regarding adoption were quite negative. If it weren’t for blogs such as The Unlikely Dad, Two Guys Adopting and Becoming Pappy. We would have been scared off. From the offset of our blog research, we realised adopting a child would be a lot more rewarding than the other options of obtaining a child. From stories of first words and images found on instagram. Sidenote – We’ve all seen the @GayDads page haven’t we, the one that only seems to post really attractive men with their beautiful children; Makes the most unbroody broody!

It was then was convincing our families and friends, that was the hardest. This being down to us not fully understanding the process and literally diving into the unknown with questions such as; what kind of child will we get? We want boys, are we able to pick? What if they leave us for their actual parents? So when they had their questions and opinions we didn’t have much ammo.

The First Step

Fast forward to May 2015 and we commence our adoption journey, with a phone call to submit our interest and request the initial paperwork. Mark was at work whilst it was my midweek day off (retail life). Having discussed it the night before we were confident, excited and nervous as to the journey ahead. Little did we know *que cliffhanger music* that we would be rejected at the first hurdle.

First off I am so glad I came across your blog because I haven’t found any LGBT bloggers or blogs to follow and I am a lesbian so I can relate. This means so much more to me on a deeper level. I’ll be following as well.